The medical costs alone should be an eye popping number.

Its going to be interesting to see the interplay between infrastructure/healthcare/environmental regulations with this completely preventable, entirely foreseeable accident over the coming years.

What medical costs? The town has ~4000 residents. If they pay for several doctors visits and checkups, we are talking about a couple million dollars.

They could cover health insurance for the entire town for a similar cost per year.

Replacing the train is likely to be more expensive.

The real cost will probably be environmental testing and remediation. Even if there isn't an big impact, it will take a lot of money to collect the data to prove it.

I was thinking lifetime costs. Every future case of cancer is going to be looked at and traced back, whether it's known to be directly attributable to the event or not. This is just a huge (un)natural experiment.

Which animal die offs? Like I said, vinyl chloride has very poor environmental and biological persistence. Any die off of livestock that was going to happen would have happened 2 weeks ago.

Hearsay: in Germany if US vehicle kills a pig, uncle sam is on the line for 6 generations of what hat pig could produce ...